For the time being, Conspiracy to Commit Poetry (the newsletter and the podcast) seems to be operating like a poet’s diary, an open journal to the world. That feels about right to me.
The late William Stafford said once in a lecture I saw on old VHS tape, “your feelings matter.” Stafford had been placed in a work camp during World War Two as a conscientious objector who refused to serve in the armed forces. So maybe he knew a little bit about how powerful forces, some more subtle than others, suppress our feelings.
My feelings, how I experience and interpret them, function centrally to my process as a poet. When I write a truly effective poem that others read or hear recited and say, “Wow how did you write that?”, it is difficult to explain the associative tendrils of emotion and language that come together in a poem. There are many hours of stewing in my feelings and many scrawled lines in notebooks that somehow seem to be part of the process of writing something else altogether. Writing a poem that works, in my experience, is something experimental and accidental.
What follows is not an example of anything ‘good’ but if you like it, I’m happy that you do. It is something I scribbled in my notebook recently. Its details come from life. I arrange these details together looking for associations. Life offers up seemingly strange, almost talismanic images, and here I string some of them together like beads of life and death.
12 September 2021, Sunday
A white bellied raven, big and black headed strutted down the boulevard, the commuter train humming by half empty on a Sunday. Death takes no holidays. Odin holds no sway over Anatolia. Walking from the bakery I see a sheep’s hoof on pine straw on the shady side of a backstreet. I am looking for signs, the footprints of ghosts.
People who do not understand poetry will ask what a poem means. Poems resonate meanings but what they mean semantically may be secondary to other aural, atmospheric, or psychological effects. Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” is about a mood as much as a bird.
I will not comment further regarding the lines from my notebook. The images please me. I can recall the moments in life that suggested them to my consciousness and I enjoyed stringing together language to express them.
If you have comments about them, I certainly would welcome them. If you are following CtCP, I thank you for your interest. It is late after an especially long day of teaching and I wanted to play around with the newsletter to do something creative .
If feelings really do matter, and having faith in the idea that process absolutely matters, then a writer’s diary entry like this may have value to somebody out there. I am confident in my poetry as the crystallization of feeling in language. It requires no further justification.